Vaderna Gábor (szerk.): Önarckép álarcokban. Kiállításkatalógus (Budapest, 2018)
Summary
Summary János Arany (Salonta [today in Romania], 2 March 1817 - Budapest, 22 October 1882) is one of the best known and influential poets of the 19th century and a prominent personality of Hungarian culture. He was the contemporary of poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Tennyson and Friedrich Hebbel. Arany lived in an era when revolutions swept over Europe, when the great age of Romanticism came to an end and when Modernism simultaneously represented the promise of development, as well as the threat of the decline of values. What he created especially as a poet is eternal, yet his activity was diverse and his work as a writer, editor, teacher and the secretary-general of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is prominent. His creativity concerning language reformed the expressive stock of Hungarian literary language. His characteristic phrases passed over to everyday language in the form of quotations and references. He used some 60,000 individual words in his works, and he read the great writings of Ancient Greek, Latin, English, German, French and Italian literature in the original. His most noted works include epics, ballads and lyrical poems. His epic poem Toldi is a compulsory school text for 12-13 year old pupils in Hungary. His poetry is a witness to a diversity of opposites. Resigned sadness, sarcasm, self-irony, painful resignation and commitment to poetry can all be found in his poems. Yet behind the humble lines often questioning his own and his works’ real value there was enormous knowledge, brilliant creativity and a conscious but continuously reflecting acceptance of the poet’s role. His literary translations have represented a unique value, both in 19th-century Hungary and at present. His still powerful translations include works by William Shakespeare, Aristophanes and Anacreon, the Scotsman Robert Burns, the Irishman Thomas Moore, the German Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the Roman Horace, the Italians Ariosto and Tasso, as well as the Russian Nikolai Gogol. As director of the Kisfaludy Society, he founded the Shakespeare Committee in 1860 to translate the most well-known works by the English playwright. His own translations of Shakespeare excelled among them, bringing to life A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and King John in the contemporary language of bygone eras. Arany’s diverse creative power is demonstrated by the libretto based on the theme of his narrative poem Knight Pázmán, which was composed by Johann Strauss the Younger, resulting in his only opera, Ritter Pasman. An outstanding ballad by Arany drew on medieval English history, but he related it to a principal issue of contemporary Hungarian society (1857-1863), behavioural forms resisting oppressive authority and achieving freedom. His poem The Bards of Wales was put to music by Karl Jenkins, a composer of Welsh origin, and its first performance in English took place with the patronage of Charles Prince of Wales on 21 June 2011. On behalf of the Welsh town Montgomery, mayor Eric Fairbrother conferred the title Freeman of Montgomery on the author of The Bards of Wales, marking the 200th anniversary of János Arany’s birth on 2 March 2017. 440
